Lemon Foundation

Facebook, the social networking site which is second only to MySpace in terms of popularity, opened up to third party developers recently, allowing its users to embed a range of widgets into their profile pages.

MySpace allowed users to place widgets in their profile pages three years ago, but has a restrictive policy on this, particularly when widgets include advertising or involve any kind of commercial activity.

In contrast, Facebook has taken an unrestricted approach to widgets, something which could be a key differentiator between the two sites.  The opening of the interface could turn Facebook into an online platform that will attract developers, and hence more users, to the site.

The company’s new platform, called f8, will let developers embed their applications on Facebook pages or within user profiles. Developers can also offer them as desktop applications. Partners can now incorporate advertising to their services, though that advertising cannot appear on the versions of the applications embedded in user’s profiles.

Though Facebook trails behind MySpace, with around 23m monthly visitors compared to its rival's 66m, it is growing faster, adding 100,000 new users daily. It is the sixth most visited site in the US, as well as having 3.5m users in the UK.  

Among the most popular widgets is Last.fm, which plays and recommends music from users’ profile pages, Flixter, which lets you rate and review films, as well as a range of video applications.

And just as every internet company has developed a strategy to leverage Google (via organic or paid search), they have also developed strategies to “widgitize” a portion of their application for distribution via Myspace and other social networks.
 
So why has Facebook opened up to widgets all of a sudden?

Aside from keeping up with MySpace and Bebo, by welcoming third-party innovation, Facebook will reap the benefit of hundreds of millions of dollars of venture investment – and the Facebook user will have a much richer experience. 

We have recently been working on an array of plugins and widgets for of our clients leveraging the extensive web services and APIs available to developers now.  As active users of Facebook ourselves, we'll hopefully have a great Facebook plugin to showcase in the coming months.